366: Your Business is Only as Strong as Your Worst Week

Transcript

Welcome to the Superabound podcast, where vision-led entrepreneurs learn to build a generous business without sacrificing what matters most. You are listening to episode 366. Your business is only as strong as your worst week. Okay, it's a bit of a lengthy title, but I want to talk about this. I know we have in the past had episodes about, you know, what happens when we are the bottleneck in our business and what happens when human life maybe gets in the way of all the success that we had imagined. Um, because I've been thinking about this a lot lately. I had shared a few episodes ago that this year in my business I have been choosing to take what I'm calling an emotional sabbatical and that doesn't mean I'm not working as much as I used to. Um I mean I think I have kind of reduced some of my work hours in another way means I'm bringing coffee to the podcast.

It's very good coffee. Um, but essentially what it means, it's more about kind of what I'm not doing. I'm not getting overly involved in promoting or growing or um stretching in my business. Not because I don't intend to do those things in the future, but because I just wanted to experience a year of stability. And of course, I think I kind of maybe expected that this whole year would be very relaxed and I wouldn't be taking on new projects. And then of course I've been talking a lot lately about my brand new Superabound oracle deck which is something that I really feel like it was a stretch for me in a whole other creative way. It's creating a physical product which you know I've created books before but this is a whole different learning curve and um all of the artwork which I have no formal training in. This has been a year of stretching myself maybe in a different way. So, I wouldn't say I've been kicking back and relaxing. I'm of course still working with clients. I'm always learning and growing as a coach or attempting to. Um, and then this whole other branch of my business has kind of grown. But that all came from giving myself space. And one of the questions I've been thinking about when I took on this year was what does it mean to be a visionary? What does it mean to be a visionary who you know if we're doing this according to the business textbooks out there? Um ideally as you become more successful you want to start to release a lot of the work that someone else could really handle. So you learn how to outsource, you learn how to delegate, you learn how to not busy yourself as a visionary with things that someone else could look after. And you do that as an act of self-investment so that you can do your best work. And so I really love that idea. I love how many people are putting their attention on that. A lot of my clients really want to be doing more of what they love and less of what they don't. Um, more of what they're kind of um most the highest expression of what they want to leave in the world, more of that kind of visionary work and less of the admin and day-to-day stuff. But what is so interesting is that even if you have managed to release everything in your business that is not of the utmost importance to you, you're not you're only doing your zone of genius work, let's call it. Um, if you've read the book The Big Leap, you'll be familiar with that term.

Even so, there's a way in which you could have a really bad week. And if you are the only person in your business delivering those higher um hightouch type of work, even if you're doing your most visionary work, it can be a problem. Um, without sharing anything private about any of my clients, I will share that one of my clients, this is not the only client that's this has ever happened to, of course, had a couple of days where, you know, they had a flu and they couldn't show up for something that is a revenue generating activity. they couldn't give a presentation and because they were not able to give that presentation and no one on their team was trained to do it and they had no um official backup for what to do. They didn't have a system for that particular problem uh because they had done it so consistently and they never get sick and all of this stuff. They watched their revenue tank for about a month because this one pivotal activity did not get done. Their team did not handle it well. Um it led to some reshuffleling of their whole organization. And I I share this because in my mind, you know, it was obviously not a great week or a great month for that particular client, but I think about all of these things in terms of what is the $10,000 learning. So from that experience where one bad week kind of snowballed into a it kind of illuminated a lot of other issues that were happening in my client's business.

It actually turned out to be something where because those things came to light, that client got $10,000 of value and so much more. I actually we haven't done the actual calculation for what that one um issue actually has created since in their business. But we were able to go back and say getting sick can happen. You know, having a flu can happen to any of us. Um family members get sick. People, you know, we lose loved ones. There are a whole bunch of things in our life and in the lives of the people we love around us that do happen. And most business owners, especially visionaries, you know, many of us are very future focused. We love to, you know, cast ourselves into, you know, what's it going to be like to light that next lantern? What's it going to be like to realize this particular aspect of my vision? And we sometimes forget that we have human lives full of surprises and some of those surprises are not fun and not easy and can derail us.

So I'm a very future focused person. I really love to like hang out with my future self and get all of their wisdom. I'm having coffee. I love my practice of coffee with the oracle. But

if your business is not full of contingency plans, if it doesn't have systems to support you when you need to take a day off or when there's an emergency, then you become a bottleneck to that next level of growth and success. So, my client's experience, as I said, because we worked through it together. This is another reason why I think every business owner should have a coach, a mentor, a consultant, someone on their team who can help them think through these things. Um, rather than it just being this horrible thing where she said, "Okay, now I need to somehow figure out how to never get sick again." We started to talk about, well, what if you want to take three weeks off? What if you want to take a year-long sabbatical and you still want your business to be thriving?

Most of us have not envisioned what it would look like for our business to run without us. And I'm very aware that many of you who are leaders or business owners are maybe thinking, well, I could never just take a year off. That would be, you know, things could not run without me. Or I, you know, maybe the way that you generate income is you are trading your time and your service for money. I'm a coach. People don't um pay my top tier VIP coaching to watch a pre-recorded video of me. They pay for the real time experience of my presence and my mind with them with all of the tools that I have combining it with what they need. there is something that cannot be automated about that and that is my highest level of of product. So I'm well aware that we're not I'm not sitting here trying to say oh we should automate everything in your business and you should find a way to I I actually really don't like when people do this when people are trying to extract the most money from their customers with um the least amount of work. I think that I've watched a lot of previously successful businesses try and do that and lose a lot of their fans and a lot of their customers because it just felt more like about them and their money than the client getting what the client needs. So, I'm not here to say like let's automate everything, let's systematize everything. But when we have these moments where one sales presentation that is normally delivered in real time, if that can't happen and the result is a month of a real dip in revenue, that becomes something maybe we need to automate. That becomes some becomes something that at the very least we need a backup plan for. and um or or someone to step in, someone on the team who can go in and deliver that same level of presentation. And this stuff is not sexy. This is not like when I start talking about systems and processes, I know people fall asleep. So, if you're driving, maybe don't listen to this episode. You think that systems and processes are boring. Um, but they are essential and sadly most of us do not preemptively put those things into place. We just assume I never get sick, so why would I need to, you know, this is a very healthy person. Why would they ever need to pre-record the presentation or have one at the ready?

Now, we know why. But what I would love for more of my own clients, more of everybody listening to have is the gift of pre-planning. Now, I will say I have always been one of I when I was a little kid, I was this way. I would kind of walk through all of the disaster scenarios. It's a wonder I was never diagnosed with anxiety. Um, but I really do not like to be surprised. I don't like even like fun surprises. I'm not a like, "Oh, yay. I hope someone throws me surprise party kind" kind of person. I like to know what's going on. I like to be prepared. I like to know the possible paths and have, you know, responses for different things and different outcomes. That's just kind of how my mind works. I think that has actually served me very well as a business owner and as a tour manager and as a yoga like of all the work that I've done. I think that that

particularity has um really been in service of you know my life and the success that I have built. And so I don't mean to offer you limitations or you know some kind of a negative view of looking at things but maybe the way I would frame it is I I would share that I was a tour manager and part of that job that I learned very early on is to always have a backup plan. You know, there was one tour. A lot of things had happened leading up to this, but there was one tour I was on where we were in a bus accident and um it was not, you know, everyone was okay. It wasn't, you know, terrible or it was scary. It wasn't um serious or life-threatening for anyone um involved. uh a few minor injuries, but our bus could not operate and our bus driver kind of got hurt and was not able to continue to drive. And at that moment, I was on the phone with my boss trying to figure out, he was in Canada, I was in somewhere like in the western part of the US trying to figure out how we were going to make it to the next few shows to finish our tour, how we were going to get move all of our equipment, all of our instruments. And so that moment of saying I am kind of feeling a little shock right now kind of having a scary experience and my nervous system was not okay. I was fine physically um but then trying to activate a problem-solving part of myself that really didn't feel like it could come online. So that is why I think we try to pre-plan these things. And I won't say that you need to sit down today and say, "Okay, let's list everything that could go wrong." Because I think that will not be supportive to you having a great day. But have you looked at what would happen if your payment processor went down? Have you looked back at the last five things that have gone wrong and created the solution that is a $10,000 learning for you? The thing that is going to make sure that if that ever happens again, you have the backup system ready to go

because most of us don't. Most of us visionaries, you know, maybe this is a self-protective thing. We go through something hard, it sucks, we get through it somehow, and then we go, I hope that never happens again. I love the the the the kind of saying that like hope is not a strategy and hope is great but hope is not going to protect you from that exact same situation happening again if you have not taken it to say this was a gift you know my for my client actually it was a gift that she she didn't see it this way in the moment it was a gift that she got sick and couldn't do that one presentation because she saw just how much of her business, just how much her team was relying on that to be able to do their work and then figured out, well, that is not if if I have to be there for this whole thing to go to make the rest of our revenue for this month and we have nothing if I've got the flu or if there's an emergency or if I, you know, if my internet goes down, it doesn't even have to be that serious. your internet can go down. We need something in place. And now she has it. And not not only does she have it, she has a lot of systems. She has um a new relationship with her team.

That is how you do this. That is how you take a problem or a bottleneck and you figure out how do I support my business even if I am not present. No one wants to think of themselves as a bottleneck. But I know that a lot of us really do like to think that we are needed in our business that we're important in our business. And of course you are, you know, your work in the world, your success has been built on you showing up, you being there, you putting things out into the world, you generating the work, but you will not be here forever. And I'm not trying to be morbid when I'm saying it, but it's just the truth. you will not always have the same amount of energy for your business in every season. Um, that was a big reason that I took my own emotional sobatical because I started to watch business owners in my industry who had been working in their business for like, you know, a year or two, maybe more than I had. And I started to watch their energy dip, like not just like burnout, but like their interest in their business just get lost. Um, I watched a lot of the industry shift and people weren't shifting with it and I watched some businesses close because they could not support their team anymore and they could not generate the revenue they were used to. These were all problems I want to avoid. And so part of it was saying, what do I need to do for my own emotional energy so that I can come back in 2027 in a different way that probably won't look all that different to the outside because I've continued my podcast. I've continued to work with clients. I've, you know, I've created another product because that's just who I am and what I do. Um, but in my own self, I've been able to cocoon a little bit and have a different energy for my own life. And I'm going to I'm not just going to shift on a dime. I'm going to bring a lot of that forward into the next year as we figure out what it is we're going to create. And um I'm excited to come in with a renewed sense of of self as a business owner, but also knowing that

as much as possible,

I can't eliminate myself as a I don't want to eliminate myself as a coach. I want to do the work I love. But if there are things in my business and in your business that depend on you, and they are going to make a huge difference if they don't happen one day for whatever reason. That's a bottleneck that needs a backup plan that needs a solution or an automation or sometimes a conversation. Maybe someone on your team needs to be trained to do the thing that you do that generates the revenue and they might not do it as well as you. They might not do it the same way as you, but you might find they do it better. I've seen that happen, too. So, these are just some thoughts about how to really strengthen your business because at the end of the day, your business is only as strong as your worst week. And you couldn't and and we don't choose when that worst week is going to be. So, if you want to really investigate this, if you're ready to kind of take what I'm saying here seriously,

let's say next week, for some reason you could not show up in your business at all,

would it be fine? Would it go off without a hitch? Would your team know what to do? Would you be able to actually unplug and support yourself if you were sick? If the answer is no, then rather than get overwhelmed and say, "Oh no, I'm heading towards a disaster." Um, first of all, get a coach. This is what we do. We help business owners to um create or it's what I do. I can't speak for every coach. I don't know what other coaches do. What may I do is help you create whole life success and the growth that you want, but in a way that we can partner both your work on your own mindset and healing your inner static as well as all the strategic thinking partnership that every business owner needs. And sometimes it's very hard to get that from within your own business. You sometimes need a third party. You know, I've looked at businesses in dozens and dozens of different industries. I know things that work. I know things that don't work. Um, and I can help you figure out what you need to make your business work even on your worst week. If that is something that you know you need, please reach out to me. You can book a free consultation over at buperbound.com/cconultation.

I'm doing those for now. I'm doing free consults um while I have space still available for 2027 for clients. And you know, if you're not quite at the level where you're ready for a VIP coach, if you know, if you're newer in your business or you're newer in your leadership journey, start just tackling one of those bottlenecks at a time. So if you look at next week and you think if I just could not be there for next week, what would be the biggest fire that would happen because I couldn't handle it or I wasn't there? Start to tackle that. Can you train a team member? Can you build a system? Can you figure out what needs to be done so that it's handled? Do a little bit of that work every week and you'll find that you will be able to have a business that is strong and steady even if your life takes you somewhere else for a week or two. Hopefully, it's on a vacation. All right, I will talk to you again soon. Have a great day. Take care.